While this is an older post, for the record.... ABI Word is not stable regardless of the version. 2.8.6 is said to be the stable version but many have had issues with that, as well. Please look in the forum for other word processors that might better suit your needs.

Most believe Libre Office is the way to go but it is large, so you have to way the advantages / disadvantages. Meanwhile, Gnumeric is a very nice spreadsheet program and I haven't seen any real issues with that one.

I think Softmaker Office is a good way to go instead of Libre Office. A lot of people like the free version, which has nearly all of the features of the paid for one, but Office 2008 is still very useable as long as you don't want to edit or write Office 2010 files.

Even the full, paid for version is very affordable if you can pick it up at a discount (it's occasionally offered at a reduced price).

While this is an older post, for the record.... ABI Word is not stable regardless of the version. 2.8.6 is said to be the stable version but many have had issues with that, as well. Please look in the forum for other word processors that might better suit your needs.

Most believe Libre Office is the way to go but it is large, so you have to way the advantages / disadvantages. Meanwhile, Gnumeric is a very nice spreadsheet program and I haven't seen any real issues with that one.

I tried abiword 2.9.x for a brief period and experienced a loss/crash like others. Switched to 2.8.6 and generally OK but again periodically trashed at the worst possible time.

i.e. boot using a very lean puppy (LiveCD, no savefile so all of ram/swap is in effect the 'savefile' space, but that isn't saved at shutdown). Data, browser, email, word processor (and spreadsheet) all outside of puppy savefile space. Load PET's/SFS's for the other things as and when needed (geany etc.).

For online banking, boot from read only CD, load a fresh copy of latest browser, loading into and running from clean RAM.

Its a old 3.3 Beta version, but seems stable (and usable). French thread (of which I speak/know very little - but the link works )

I also downloaded a UK dictionary and opened that using the Libre Text Editor - which installed the dictionary.

Set the Libre options to uncheck Java and it doesn't complain at startup about Java being missing.

In my case I run using CD/ram boot Puppy (no savefile), so I installed to /mnt/sda4/libre_portable (hard disk) and copied the Libre config directory contents (under /root/.config) - after initially setting it up - to the hard disk directory. I also created a run libre script to start up libre and that deletes the /root/.config/libre directory and creates a symbolic link to the /mnt/sda4 based version of those config files (i.e. libre configuration persistence across reboots). I also changed the Libre Config PATHS choices to be more appropriate for my set up (directories on the HD rather than under /root (non persistence in my case as I don't save puppy sessions between reboots)).

Abiword.... yes a long term unstable application that been with puppy for years... never saw the point myself and always the first thing i remove. Its ok if you only want to handle documents of 1 to 2 pages.

Softmaker office... surprised to hear of instability... we use it pretty regularly now and never had a problem and even barry's weird gtkdialog approach to running it should not affect that. Shame as its size for the word processor only is about the same as abiword.
Mind you we use older linux so perhaps its one of those precise mysteries.

My libre office sfs 3.4.4 sfs is around 100MB ... but its just its clunkiness and slow launching that puts the family off compared to softmaker...I'm sure a quad core gives better performance. As for compatibility it and softmaker give similar results.

My mistake. I scanned the directory size (right click, properties) and just noted the size, forgetting that I'd made a backup copy of the main compressed file and also 2 copies of the UK dictionary.

I'm finding that its pretty quick, especially if you leave the quicklaunch tray thing active (that does however disappear each time a jwm -restart occurs) i.e. start it with LibreOffice33portable -quickstart &

My one argument in keeping ABI Word around it that it may actually handle some document conversion better than Libre. Meaning when converting from one file format to another, ABI seems to keep the original more true to its form (at least in some instances).

Softmaker office... surprised to hear of instability... we use it pretty regularly now and never had a problem and even barry's weird gtkdialog approach to running it should not affect that. Shame as its size for the word processor only is about the same as abiword.

Looks like it might have been due to a circular reference somewhere within the 20+ worksheet heavy loaded spreadsheet I used for evaluation. I suspect that's crept in from being migrated between xls and ods and ... whatever several times now.

More generally, Softmaker's running well. The only annoyance is the menu text size. For some of it I have to squint closely at the screen - and I don't like having to lean forwards out of my comfortable laid back more usual posture

Barries 'fix' is just a complicated and dependency heavy (gtkdialog 4) way to take the user to sign up at the softmaker website...A little pointless really so nothing to do with the program itself as far as i can tell.

From google

Quote:

If you choose "Linux (system)" in Tools/Options/Appearance, SoftMaker Office inherits the colors and menu fonts from KDE or Gnome.

Well had a play with this and not much success. Other options that come to mind would be the system dpi settings or font configs in /etc/fonts... they do look like a crappy small windows type or bitmap.

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